Google in bid to halt YouTube legal threat — By Joshua Chaffin and Aline van Duyn in New York and Richard Waters in San Francisco — Google is engaged in a frantic round of negotiations aimed at persuading traditional media companies to supply their content to YouTube …

Knee deep in the big YouTube — The toughest negotiations in a corporate acquisition are usually carried out between the two companies directly involved, and they're usually completed before the merger agreement is signed. But with Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube …

MSN Music presses mute on downloads — Two years after opening its MSN Music store to compete with Apple Computer's iTunes, Microsoft plans to stop selling downloads from the site, CNET News.com has learned. — Beginning, Nov. 14, MSN's music site will begin redirecting music purchasers …

Cingular launches "Cingular Music" — Well, it looks like that WSJ rumor we ran yesterday was pretty much spot on. Cingular is indeed launching a music service today, and we must say the scope of their undertaking is quite impressive: integration with three separate music stores, along with supplemental content aplenty.

Reality check: Microsoft isn't waving the white flag — It makes for good headlines, but the reality is Microsoft isn't conceding anything with its newly minted Novell alliance. — There is no hell freezing over, no snowballs melting and definitely no white flags fluttering over the Microsoft headquarters building.

Sorting Through the MothersClick Mess — The MothersClick mess is slowly sorting itself out. The founder emailed today and apologized. I apologized back. — Tonight I came across a post by their PR firm that is infinitely interesting to me (via DJI, a really excellent blog).

RANT: THE COMCAST HD DVR IS SIMPLY, TERRIBLY AWFUL — This has been boiling in me for a long, long time, and I need to get it out. Why? Well, last night the power went out at my house, not uncommon here in Marin, where the homes are old and the weather rainy.

Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet — Amazon's CEO wants to run your business with the technology behind his Web site. But Wall street wants him to mind the store — It was one of the Web's typical flash frenzies, a gaggle of geeks seeking the new, new thing. At 2 a.m. on Aug. 24 …

Podcast math: we don't know what we don't know — Managing Editor — Lost Remote — Ze Frank calls it the Nerd Fight. He is disputing Rocketboom's assertions that they have 350,000 viewers a day. At the center of this dispute is what we decide a "view" really is.

Microsoft Zune player and software hands-on gallery — It's been a long, arduous trip prying our way into Microsoft's inner workings this past year, but we finally got a chance to sit down with all three Zunes and get some serious play time with the damned things.

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 review: Quad Core is here! — Since the release of Intel's Conroe micro-architecture, the company has been making waves, massive waves. In terms of performance, Intel washed away main competitor AMD, and they have continued to do so during the past three months …

Gmail Offers to Open XLS in Spreadsheets — Caleb sent in a screenshot showing how Gmail suggests to open attached XLS (Microsoft Excel) files in Google Spreadsheets. I'm not sure if everyone can see this feature yet. — I guess we can expect much more of this cross-integration to be rolled …

YouTube, Coming Soon to Your Cell Phone — We've been hearing about the possibilities of YouTube pushing mobile for awhile. A few people we have talked with in the mobile industry have said that the company has been burning the midnight oil working on getting a mobile offering out as soon as possible.

TinyPodcast: A week with a Samsung Q1 Ultra Mobile PC — TinyPodcast: A week with a Samsung Q1 Ultra Mobile PC: Play Now | I wrote a teaser post a few days ago in ink, about a new device that I got to play with for a week. To top off that week in grand style, Brian and I got together to record a podcast, old-school style.

Why Is Adobe Soundbooth Intel-Only? … Curiously, the Mac version only runs on Intel-based Macs. — A WEE BIT OF TECHNICAL BACKGROUND FOR NON-DEVELOPERS, WITH THE GOAL OF EXPLAINING THE DIFFICULTY OF DEVELOPING FOR MULTIPLE COMPUTER ARCHITECTURES, BUT WHICH WILL BE KEPT RELATIVELY BRIEF …

SEO Salaries - How Much Should You Make — This is going to be a tough and contentious issue and one that isn't easy for me to write about. Along with the obvious internal conflicts of interest in disclosing salary numbers, there's bound to be a lot of companies and individuals …

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